Excerpts from homily at Updike service

The following are excerpts from the homily delivered by the Rev. Wendel W. Meyer, rector of St. John's Episcopal Church, Beverly Farms, Mass., where a memorial service was held Monday for author John Updike:

"We are here today to celebrate the life, work and faith of John Updike. In truth, I would be far more comfortable simply focusing these remarks on John's strong and resilient faith, but that would be separating the inseparable, for in an important sense John was a seamless garment and his faith was delicately and intricately woven into the warp and weft of his life and work. ...

"John Updike, my friends, was a man who lived a life that was inspired and infused by his thirst for the divine, and that longing colored the way he experienced reality and the way he described it. ...

"John Updike accepted the universe because he believed that reality was permeated with the spirit of the Lord who created, redeemed and sustains it. ...

http://www.readingeagle.com/article.aspx?id=123871

John Updike, 1932 - 2009

From PBS - Religion and Ethics-

After 21 novels and countless short stories, John Updike still creates characters who behave in the usual Updikean fashion, embarking on ribald sexual escapades and wrestling with spiritual and moral angst.

His latest book, VILLAGES, published in October to mixed reviews, returns to the themes — first mined to full effect in the 1960s in works such as RABBIT, RUN and COUPLES — of mortality, salvation, and lots of sex. John Updike the man, however, seems to have mellowed with age, reaching peace after his own professed search for existential comfort.

At a talk on religion in his work Thursday evening (Nov. 18) at St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan, Updike told the audience of 300 that his Christian faith had “solidified in ways less important to me than when I was 30, when the existential predicament was realer to me than now. … I worked a lot of it through and arrived at a sort of safe harbor in my life.”
While much of his earlier work contains traces of Updike’s furious immersion in Christian theology, he said he looked more to the congregation of his hometown Massachusetts church as the rock of his faith today.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/episodes/january-27-2009/john-updike-1932-2009/2078/